I’ve returned to the grid today, and it seems little has changed.  Nagging problems continue with e-mail.   Tonight, I am unable to send e-mail – it looks as though something is amiss with Media Temple.  I filed a support request on it.

Tommorrow, it’s back to the grind.  I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, and I’ve got to prioritize the irons.  I can’t say that I missed the grid when I was off of it.  Priorities off the gird were things like going for a walk, stacking wood, keeping track of the kids playing in the snow, and getting in some reading time.

I’ve added a page for the archives – old content I’m not sure what to do with, but want to put somewhere. For starters, I put a site that we did about our wedding back in 2003.

9316As of this afternoon, I’m off for the Holidays, which means I won’t be at work and I’ll be on-line a bit less. All the sites and e-mail accounts have been moved, though I still have a few things to clean up.

One issue I’ve run into: what do do with old content? I’ve been running atomicspatula.com since 2000, and I’ve got various old web sites and other material. They’re out-of-date and perhaps only interesting to me. But if I leave them in a tar file on some backup CDs, won’t I lose track of them?

This also marks the end of running my own physical server. I started doing this back in 2003, when I ran a small business and got a SDSL connection with a fixed IP address. My first server was a 100 MHz dell running Windows NT and IIs. I switched to Apache after it was hacked via those nice exploits Microsoft makes available. After a disk crash, I bought a copy of Red Hat 9, and moved it to another cast-off Dell desktop.

Following the closure of the business, I moved the server to DVD Labs, and soon after they bought a new Dell server for me to run on, which I set up with Fedora FC3, as Red Hat had gone all Enterprise.

Now, we’re on Media Temple’s Grid Servers which appear to be some sort of Debian Linux using virtualization.

So far, so good.

Well, I had a bit of a scare. I thought Media Temple had a unreasonable restriction on the memory a php script could use. It made use of the Gallery2/Wordpress plugin (WPG2) unworkable, and seemed to cause errors in Gallery2.

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Fortunately, this is not the case, as Media Temple’s Grid Servers allow you to set it in the php.ini file. So posts can include pictures like this one in a simple way.

I changed over the DNS Settings this morning. Since you’re reading this it must have worked somehow.

The Atomic Spatula Gallery:

The gallery’s URL has changed slightly: http://gallery.atomicspatula.com. Otherwise, it should be pretty much the same. Unfortunately, if you’ve posted links to gallery pictures on forums or in e-mail, the links are now broken.

Subversion:

Working directories using the Atomic Spatula subversion repository will no longer work. A new repository will be set up shortly, but access will be a bit different. Details to follow.

DAV:

Atomic Spatula will not do DAV anymore. We’ll work out file sharing via other means.

I wanted a plain white theme, clean and modern looking that didn’t waste too much space, particularly at the top. After a couple hours of looking, I ended up with this.

I’m not sure I’ll stick with it, but it will do for now. I’m probably going to do my own theme styled after a green quadrille engineering notebook. I’ll add it to the ToDo list.

The thing I like about blogs is the resurgance of plain text on the web. The last thing I want is something that looks like a UI, which shading and fake 3-D bevels and such.

But red text on black may not be the most readable thing in the world.

My first attempted at moving the gallery was a failure. I neglected to to turn off and uninstall URL rewriting. I tried to patch up the result, but after wasting a few ours mucking about with it, I decided to start over.

That meant waiting 4 hours for the data to transfer again (1.5 GB). I’m using this recipie.

I’ve begun moving the photo Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/). The documentation for this is quite good – there’s specific step-by-step instructions on how to do a server-server move. The size of the gallery is a bit awkward – about 2 Gig, which will take about 4 hours to copy to the new server.

Welcome! This is the new and improved atomic spatula. We’re moving from our previous home, our own server hosted by DVDLabs in cambridge to these fine shared hosting servers at Media Temple. Right now, there’s very little to show for our efforts, but stay tuned!

- Greg